Once brainier readers have established the real identity of the pseudonymous Sam Bourne, 'an award-winning British journalist in his thirties', by turning to the novel's copyright page, they might re-focus their attention on the marginally harder task of cracking the various codes and conundrums contained in the main body of the book, a thriller of the new school.

It is not given to us to know Sam Bourne's inspiration, unlike his real name, but neither, on the available evidence, is it far-fetched to suggest that The Righteous Men had a greater chance of being written after Dan Brown had worked the alchemy of transforming a vast pile of old nonsense into a vast pile of new cash.

Anyway, in the world of the new thriller, a conspiracy, a code, a cabal and a captive are minimum requirements, so it's a great start when Will Monroe's wife, Beth, goes missing, just pages after giving him a cheap sexual thrill in a diner (hurrah!) and then shouting at him for missing their appointment at the fertility clinic (boo!). Our only other information is that she's a child psychiatrist, her hair smells of sunshine and dewberries and her worrying ambition for her marriage is that it should resemble John and Yoko's.

It is fortunate that Will is a crack journalist, raised in England but now the coming man on the New York Times, and that he can, therefore, track down her abductors to a tiny and extremely Hassidic quarter of Brooklyn, where he is peremptorily, although briefly, snatched and roughed up. An ex-girlfriend, who rather too readily forgives his jilting ways for my taste, is on hand to help him decode the mysterious messages that arrive by text message; thank goodness she, unlike anyone else, understands the mysteries of predictive text (who imagined that 'wet nose debugs room' really means 'yet more deaths soon'?).

At the same time, all sorts of oddballs are turning up dead, their only connection a propensity to commit random acts of kindness. Death comes to do-gooders including a pimp with a heart of gold, a techno-geek who has worked out with extraordinary ease how to destroy the world's child pornography websites and a crazed American survivalist keen to give away his extraneous organs. (This last episode leads to a marvellous conspiracy theory revelation: 'You know, they had a secret Pentagon project to see if men could kill goats, simply by staring at 'em? I am not making this up.' Indeed not: it might well have been suggested by Jon Ronson's book, handily entitled The Men Who Stare At Goats. But who doesn't like a research shortcut?)

'This is not the movies,' a character remarks, a phrase whose poignant obviousness reminds me of a tough acquaintance whose precursor to hitting someone is to tell them: 'This isn't talking.'

In truth, despite the welter of Jewish arcana, mysterious bumpings-off and the introduction of a brilliantly sinister newspaper editor called Townsend McDougal, it isn't much of a book, either. But neither is it the worst example of a genre whose day probably has some time to run, and Sam Bourne, unless Jonathan Freedland is hiding his light under a bushel in the manner of the pseudonymous activist collective Luther Blissett, should not feel shy to call it his own.